We first heard about the concept of “Core Four” from David Greene at BiggerPockets. In fact, he wrote a blog post about it which we are linking here, because we want to give credit to where credit is due. We agree this is a valuable lesson for all real estate investors so we will provide our interpretation around the Core Four.

Deal Finder

A deal finder keeps your inbound pipeline flowing. Traditionally, a deal finder is a real estate agent; but creatively, this role can also be filled by a wholesaler. In either case, the effective way to work with a deal finder is to provide clear and concise search criteria to them, so they will only funnel leads that already meet your search criteria to you to analyze, saving you the maximum amount of time and effort.

Property Manager

Once you have a rental property going, a property manager, or PM in short, is the person you will be interacting with closely and continuously. The responsibilities start from screening / placing tenants to your units, collecting rents, coordinating the maintenance requests, evicting tenants… and everything in between! It is best for you as a real estate investor to invest the time to interview and build a long term relationship with a good property manager.

Contractor

A contractor can help you as a real estate investor in different ways. First, if you are a flipper, you need to work closely with a contractor to scope out level of work and cost on any rehab project. Their accuracy directly impacts your bottom line, including stay on budget on the rehab cost, as well as stay on time so you can turn around and sell the property for profits.

In addition, if you are a rental owner, a contractor helps you by keeping your property in good condition, and be able to maintain good tenant relationship by responding to service requests on time and on quality. In this scenario, the contractor will most likely work more closely with the property manager, but if you have a direct relationship with the contractor it will make communications even easier.

Lender

Unless you are Richie Rich (am I dating myself here?) you probably will need to finance your deals at some point. Some of the real estate deals can get creative and you will need to have a lender relationship to work with you on some of these creative deals. We can always ask for seller financing but that is not very common. So it is beneficial to have a lender in your network, someone you can rely on when all other finance options fail.

This is not a set-in-stone concept, but in the real estate investor community, we have heard multiple times that it is good to build a finance relationship with a local credit union or community bank. They seem to provide a more personal service, and willing to work with you more by providing exceptions to certain underwriting guidelines. Of course, you will need to build up that relationship and not expect the underwriter to override all your conditions the first day you apply for a loan. The time to build the relationship will pay off later.

We found ourselves always referring back to David’s book: Long-Distance Real Estate Investing: How to Buy, Rehab, and Manage Out-of-State Rental Properties. If you have not read it yet, we strongly urge you to pick up a copy from Amazon.